If you’d been told last Sunday that today’s
sermon was going to be ‘All about Sects’, you might have felt like inviting
some friends along to hear all about it. But it’s just as well you didn’t,
because the Sects I shall be telling you about are spelt S-E-C-T-S rather than
the three-letter type.

All of us know someone who belongs to a sect
rather than to a church. The question we need to ask ourselves is why
some people choose to become Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, or Seventh Day
Adventists, to name just three sects which exist in Beckenham no less than Bath
or Birmingham.

First let’s be clear what the word ‘sect’ means. Most
people think it’s related to words like ‘bisect’, ‘intersection’ and
‘section’ which all come from the Latin word for ‘to cut’: and so ‘bisect’
means ‘to cut in half’, ‘intersect’ means ‘to cut across’,
and ‘section’ is something that has been ‘cut out’ of something
larger than itself. So, in religious terms they think it’s a movement which
has ‘broken away’ from the mainstream of a particular faith and set up on
its own.

But that’s not where the word ‘sect’ comes from. It’s
got nothing to do with cutting or breaking up but comes from the Latin word for
‘to follow’. So in English it’s related to words like ‘sequence’ and
‘consequence’ and ‘sequel’, all of which mean ‘something that follows
something (or someone) else’.

Now if you look at the history of sects you will always find
that they have their origin in a particular person whose ideas and leadership
others decide to follow. That’s as true of the Mormon’s, Seventh Day
Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses which were all started by American
preachers in the 19th Century as of the Islamic sects of Shiites and
Sunnis, and more recently Fatah and Hezbollah.

Every sect begins with a Leader, whose charm and
persuasiveness and the new beliefs he (or she) has to offer attract a group of
followers, or disciples.

Every Leader has to offer people some reason for
following – and that’s why their beliefs are so important to them.
But the remarkable thing about the supposedly ‘new’ beliefs would-be Leaders
offer their followers is that those beliefs always prove not to be new at
all, but ideas which were doing the rounds hundreds or even thousands of years
ago but sooner or later became discredited and forgotten about.

So, for instance, what Jehovah’s Witnesses believe is no
different from what a priest called Arius taught people to belief in the 4th
Century AD. Arius wanted to popularise the Christian faith by making
it easier to believe. So he came up with the claim that Jesus Christ is not
actually God, but merely a God-like being. He didn’t go
as far as to say that Jesus was nothing more than a human being (like you and
me), but he made Him out to be a sort of Angelic Superman, who deserves our
respect and honour and whose teachings and example must be taken seriously, but
definitely not someone who is ‘of one substance’ with God the Father
and worshipped with Him.

Today’s Jehovah’s Witnesses go one better than Arius. They
teach that Jesus and Michael the Archangel are one and the same person. But it’s
all the same old story, which is why it’s quite a good ploy to say to those
Witnesses who come to your door, ‘now let me see, you Witnesses are Arians,
aren’t you?’. It works a treat because not one Witness in a thousand has
even heard of Arius. So why not give it a try – always of course making sure
that you can remember who Arius actually was!

But for us this morning the most important fact about Jehovah’s
Witnesses (and other sects) is that they succeed. Why? Because they have
sussed out the importance of leadership. Every Witness is expected to
become a leader almost from Day One. That’s why they always work in pairs.
New Witnesses soon find themselves expected to go out with more experienced ones
to learn how to lead others into what they imagine to be the Truth.

That’s a lesson we Christians must learn from them. Far too
many churchgoers see themselves as being ‘The Led’ rather than ‘The
Leaders’. In one sense, of course, we’re all ‘The Led’ – from Bishop,
Archbishop, Pope to the laity we are always led by the Holy Spirit into
the Way of Truth. But we all have a duty to lead others –
whether it’s our children, our parents, our neighbours or those we work with,
into the Truth ‘as it has been revealed in Jesus Christ’

There’s another reason why sects attract followers: because
they make demands both personal and financial on them. Many Christians
are allowed to get away with the idea that need only turn up occasionally to
Church on Sundays and put a small amount of money in the collection plate. So is
it any wonder that church-going is seen by outsiders as a form of recreation
which some people choose to do on Sundays, whilst others prefer to play golf or
clean the car? Of course, we must always remember how Jesus told us that those
two little coins which that poor widow put into the collection were more
valuable than the more impressive sums that others contributed. But that all
she had. Which of us has ever emptied all the money in our pocket or handbag
into the collection?

But there’s a third reason why people find sects attractive.
If they are going to survive they have to be a tight-knit community of people.
The appeal of belonging to a small minority gives that minority a sense
of importance and significance. You become a large fish in a small pond.

That’s why sects become very supportive of their
members. You never find anyone who belongs to a sect in dire poverty for any
length of time. Someone who belongs to the sect will always see it as their
particular duty to minister to the person in need, whether it’s a personal
problem, being a baby-sitter or helping a house-bound person by doing their
shopping for them. Why do they so supportive? Because sects value their
individual members far more than we do. They see them as their treasures,
rather than people who happen, like us, to ‘enjoy doing that sort of thing on
Sunday’.

Take a look at the person beside or in front of you in the
pew. You may like or dislike them; you may not even know who they are. But it’s
quite likely that God has guided them, and you, to sit beside one another in
church this morning for reasons which He alone knows best. At least you can say
‘Good morning!’ to them (which is a code-prayer for ‘May God give you a
good morning’). Next Sunday if you see them preferring to sit as far away from
you as possible then that’s as a sign that God intends someone else to
minister to them on His behalf.

So far we have only looked at the good things we can
learn from looking at how and why sects attract people. So here are two of their
thoroughly bad aspects which we would do well to learn and take warning
from.

Sects begin by getting one or more aspects of the truth
quite wrong. In the case of Witnesses, it’s claiming that Jesus Christ isn’t
God but merely ‘God-like’. Once you get something like that wrong
a whole series of other mistaken beliefs will follow. Arius and Jehovah’s
Witnesses started off with the idea of making the Christian faith easier to
understand and accept – but that that simply doesn’t work,as
we know only too well from the recent history of the Church of England. Take
one falsehood on board in the name of making the faith more attractive, or
simpler, or fairer or more in keeping with the beliefs of the age we are
living in, and a whole tidal wave of other falsehoods follows. Why? Because if
the Early Church was wrong in calling Jesus ‘True God from true God’,
there’s no reason to think they haven’t got lots of other things wrong
as well. As said Dean Inge said ‘He who marries the beliefs of the one
age, will find himself a widow in the next.

Anybody who blindly
plays Follow-my-Leader, whether the Leader is their Vicar, a Politician, a
Bishop, a Social Scientist or a Dictator, is asking for trouble. Some
Leaders lose their vision; some turn out to be morally flawed; others
get big-headed and make exaggerated claims about themselves and turn
into control-freaks or bullies. Of course it’s true that God in every
generation has raised up Leaders in His Church, and those Leaders are there
to be followed – just so long as they continue on the ‘straight and
narrow way’. But leaders are mortal; leaders die; leaders lose heart;
leaders mislead. For us the mystical Body of Christ there can only
ultimately be one Leader – our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Himself. ‘In
Him (and only in Him) as St Paul said ‘there dwells all the fullness of
the Godhead in bodily form.’